Tag #154184 - Interview #90538 (Ignac Neubauer)

When in the 1970s Jews began to move to Israel, I thought about it like it was a miraculous escape from everything I hated that the God sent me. My relatives also decided to emigrate. My mother and stepfather were the first to go. They were pensioners at that time. My mother was severely ill and her doctors were talking her out of emigration telling her that she was not fit for traveling and that the climate in Israel was not good for her, but my mother decided to move there, nevertheless. She lived 7 years in Israel: good medications and qualified doctors… They lived in Bnei Brak. When my father’s brother Mendl got to know that she was in Israel he visited her right away. Mendl supported and visited my mother. My mother died in 1977.  Mendl died in the middle 1980s. My mother’s husband Gedale never remarried. He lived in Bnei Brak and died in 1988. He was buried near my mother. In 1972 my sister Hermina and her family moved to Qiriat Ono. I was eager to go to Israel, but my wife was against emigration. Her sisters supported her. They lived their lives in the USSR and were patriots of their country. They blindly believed the propaganda on the radio and in publications. They never gave it a deeper thought; they just believed what they heard. Their middle sister Donia, the children’s doctor, was particularly stubborn about it. She was telling me that Israel is a capitalist country and capitalists were exploiters and working people had a very hard life there. I was trying to tell her that she had never practiced capitalism while I lived during capitalism and those were the best years of my life, that if a person had a good job, he could make his living and support his family well while with socialism it didn’t matter whether one worked or he didn’t, didn’t matter – he will be miserably poor anyways. Besides, one feels a fool, when working hard he earns the same wages as lazy bones doing nothing.  However, these were mere words for my wife and her sisters that they didn’t make an effort to think about. So it happened that we stayed in the USSR. I didn’t have much choice: emigration or the family and I chose the family.